Unvisited Tombs
… The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871).
Mary Ann Evans (pen name “George Eliot”) wrote such novels as Daniel Deronda and The Mill on the Floss.